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In a Dallas courtroom on Thursday, writer and activist Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison and was ordered to pay a little more than $890,000 in restitution and fines, according to reports.

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Microsoft's Charney, congressmen to chair cybersecurity advisory commission for next president

Whether it's Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani or Barack Obama -- or any of their competitors -- who is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, the next president of the United States will have a list of cybersecurity recommendations on their desk.

Reps. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and Michael McCaul, D-Texas, announced this week the formation of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, a group that, along with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), will develop advice for the next administration on how to best secure cyberspace and the nation's critical infrastructure.

“What we'd like is a nice package of implementations that are concrete and actionable,” he said. “What you get a lot of times are very academic recommendations or very ‘pie in the sky' recommendations, and we wanted people who have a realistic sense of what people can do.”

The panel will include more than 30 cybersecurity experts, including Scott Charney, corporate vice president for trustworthy computing at Microsoft, and retired U.S. Navy Adm. Bobby Inman, Lyndon B. Johnson National Policy chair at the University of Texas, Austin.

“As commerce and online communication have flourished, so have the challenges to cybersecurity. It is imperative that industry and government work together to take the steps necessary to secure the internet and critical infrastructures,” Charney said in a news release. “We need a holistic approach that includes technology, policy, vigilance in the public and private sectors and law enforcement.”

Marcus Sachs, executive director for government affairs and national security policy at Verizon, and director of the SANS Internet Storm Center, told SCMagazineUS.com today that he will serve on the commission, but members are not scheduled to see the agenda until later this month.

The group, which is scheduled to complete its work by December 2008, will create recommendations for infrastructure protection, software assurance and information security initiatives for both the private and public sectors.

“The CSIS, this is the same group that put together the Iraq
Study Group, and we really have the top minds in the country in cybersecurity
working on this. We hope it will be of a similar stature as the Iraq Study
Group Report,” he said. “Success to me would be to have a president that would
embrace it and a Congress that would embrace it.”

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